Until Relieved

by Rick Shelley

  "We've knocked out all six of the enemy tanks," Major Parks reported softly after a detail of enlisted men had started digging a grave for the executive officer.

  "Sorry about Terry." Parks had seen Terry Banyon killed. He had directed a medical orderly to him before it was clear that Banyon was beyond any possible field repairs. Dezo's visor was up now, and his face was grimy. He watched the colonel closely. He knew how close Stossen and Banyon had been.

  Stossen shrugged. It happens. "You're exec now, Dezo." If his voice was less firm than usual, neither he nor Parks gave any sign. It was something that would never be mentioned.

  "I don't think this raid was just a throwaway," Parks said after a moment. He was operations officer for the 13th, but intelligence analysis was always part of that job. "It wasn't strong enough to be a serious attempt to dislodge us, but it was too strong to be just something to keep us occupied."

  "A diversion?" Stossen asked.

  "Has to be. It seems fairly clear that the Heggies have been moving large numbers of troops out of Porter City at night. And they're moving them away from us, as near as we've been able to tell. Out of range of our Wasps. How they've routed them from there is anybody's guess, but mine is that they're staging for a major attempt on us. I don't see it simply as a retreat, keeping out of our way. That would mean that they knew—beyond a doubt—that we're here merely to keep them in place. Without that knowledge, no Schlinal warlord would dare retreat and ignore us. Even without the overwhelming advantage in numbers they have, that would be a capital offense in the Schlinal military. So they must be staging for an attack."

  "How long do you think we have?"

  "Unless their concealment measures are a lot better than we think they are, they must still be more than a hundred klicks away from the perimeter, most likely a lot farther. Our observation out to a hundred klicks is simply too tight to miss significant numbers. We're patrolling that much area with regularity, and that's also the primary focus for the sensing from the fleet and the spyeyes we launched. But if the Heggies have shuttles ready to move their men, that still might not give us a lot of warning before the attack comes." Even if the enemy launched a fleet of shuttles three-hundred kilometers away from the perimeter, the men on the ground might be lucky to receive ten minutes warning.

  "Come at us from somewhere up on the plateau, not up either of the access roads to the valley?" Stossen had his own opinion, but he wanted to hear what Parks had to say.

  Parks shook his head. "I don't think they'd dare try to come up from below, not in any real force. They have to know that we can hold either of those routes against anything they can throw at us. Easier than the three-hundred Spartans." Even after nearly six thousand years, that stand was recalled by career military officers. It was studied in nearly every military academy in the Terran Cluster.

  Stossen pulled out his mapboard and clicked it back to a broader view of the entire plateau region.

  "Most of the area within three hundred klicks is heavily forested. For that matter, most of the plateau is. Trees and occasional regions of prairie." And most of it was unsettled, even after centuries of human presence on the world. The staff had gone over maps of all of the regions of Porter that might have any bearing on their planned operations. Stossen was a careful thinker though, and he preferred to have his maps open and in front of him at a time like this. It helped him to keep his thinking straight if he went over everything as if it were completely new to him.

  "The clearings here, more around Maison." Stossen pointed to areas north and northwest of the town. "Rocky areas here." He pointed off to the east and northeast.

  "Too open," Parks offered. "No cover, visual or IR, and too much chance of the movement being spotted by someone in Maison. The Heggies have to figure that we left people there, spotters, or at least radios for the locals to call us." A number of radios had been left in the town, and instructions on how to report anything of interest. The Special Intelligence men from the Maison team were also still in the town, undercover now.

  "Maybe the Heggies could hide a few hundred men for a time in the crevices and gullies in the rocky areas, but not for any significant amount of time. And you can't throw a heat shield over several thousand men and all their equipment in either area. You'd get leakage no matter what." Parks had no hard data to back up that assertion, but he had no doubt about it, and Stossen merely nodded agreement. That many men, there would be some sign.

  "If they're going to stage on the plateau, I'd suggest that either of these places is more likely." Parks pointed out two other areas, both farther away from the 13th and from Maison. Both areas offered thick forest with small clearings that were large enough for VTOL shuttles to get in and out quickly.

  "We can get a look at them," Stossen conceded. "Of course, there's nothing that says there's any limit on the places they might be. Or even that they have to stage on the plateau. Assuming they have sufficient lift capability, they could pick just about any place they like, anywhere on the continent." Porter's sole continent stretched from the north polar zone to latitude 60 south, as much as nine-thousand kilometers wide in places.

  "We can't watch the whole continent that closely," Parks said. "We can get coverage—do get coverage—but not the intensive sort we'd need to find them. Not without launching a lot more spyeyes, and it would take a day or two to get them all in position, assuming that the ships are carrying enough to do the job. We could increase the diameter of the inner zones..."

  Photo and video surveillance of the planet was based on distance from the regiment's landing zones. Out to a radius of one-hundred kilometers, the coverage was most intense, virtually continuous. From one hundred to two hundred kilometers out, there was at least hourly observation of each section, though at somewhat lower resolution. From two-hundred to five-hundred kilometers, the frequency of coverage was still less, as little as once in four hours for some areas. Farther out than that, an area might be eyeballed from orbit as infrequently as once a day.

  Stossen shook his head. "Even that would take more satellites, and we can't tell if we have time for it." He took a deep breath.

  "You know," he said more softly, "there's no way to know how long we'll be here now. Pickup delayed. Hold until relieved or recalled. No matter how long it is, we'll have to make do with what we have, here and aboard the ships." He didn't want to think about what might have caused the delay. Once he started doing that, it would be far too easy to let his imagination run away with him, dreaming up all sorts of disasters.

  "Food and ammunition." Parks nodded. "Food may be less of a problem. We can always do a little foraging. There is game around here, and nothing native is supposed to be toxic to humans. No reported problems anyway. Porter's been settled long enough for any incompatibilities to show up. We can check with some of the locals about edible plants."

  "Game means cooking fires." Stossen shrugged. "Well, they know we're here. The men will have to be careful about it though. Just in daylight, early enough so the ashes are cold before sunset. That sort of thing."

  "But ammunition," Parks said. "What do we do, pull in and stick with strictly defensive fire? Maybe collect some of the weapons and ammo we left in Maison?"

  Stossen was quiet for a minute before he replied. He thought of the Havoc barrage he had loosed the first morning, just to ease the way for one company that was having a little too much difficulty reaching their objective. There was no helping that prodigality now. Those rounds were gone. "No, we won't go back to Maison unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Hunker down and wait?" He shook his head. "I don't think so. The Heggies get the idea that something's wrong, they'll really be all over us. Or ignore us and send part of the garrison off to Devon, and that's what we're here to prevent."

  "Continue with our original harassment?"

  Stossen let a smile spread across his face. He did not spend a lot of time mulling over the idea that had just come to him. It felt right. "No. Let's really go for it."

&nb
sp; "You mean take Porter back all by ourselves?" Parks returned the smile.

  "Maybe not, but maybe we can make the Heggies rethink their own plans. When our pickup does come, it will be easier if we don't have Heggies stacked up around our perimeter here."

  "Head for Porter City?"

  "There's no other suitable target, is there?" Stossen asked, his voice mild, with a touch of humor. He continued to turn the idea over in his mind. There were risks, serious risks, but that was true of any possible course. They were on their own. For how long, neither of them could even guess. Doing everything possible to keep the Schlinal garrison reacting instead of acting had to help. He hoped.

  "How strong an effort?" Parks asked, his mind switching over to tactics.

  Stossen took time to consider that. "We want the effort to be strong enough for the Heggies to take notice, but not so strong that we're a pushover here. Say, the same sort of effort we directed at Maison—two line companies, two recon platoons, one Havoc battery. We'll give them as much Wasp cover as we can, as needed."

  "The Havocs could range about a bit," Parks said. "We can't hold them back to the speed of men on foot."

  "But Havocs need infantry support. You saw how long the Novas lasted once they got away from their support."

  Parks nodded, conceding the point.

  "You think we can afford to use shuttles to put the strike force closer to their target?" Parks asked. "Going full out, it would take six days for them to walk the whole distance to Porter City. That gives the Heggies too much time to chop them up. And we don't know how many days we've got."

  "That'll take six landers, five with a little overcrowding." Stossen didn't hesitate now. If this move was going to have any effect at all, it would have to be done quickly, with panache, before the Schlinal forces could mount whatever attack they were preparing. Stossen grinned, then nodded.

  "Get them into five shuttles. Set it up so the landers are down fifteen minutes before sunset. We'll load up and get them moving as soon as it's dark. The Havocs and their support vehicles will have to go on their own. They can catch up, rendezvous near Porter City."

  "How close do we set the infantry down?"

  "Let's look at the map and see what we've got," Stossen said.

  —|—

  "Why us again?" Wiz Mackey asked as Echo Company gathered at the LZ. "We had our fun. Shouldn't one of the other companies draw this gig?"

  "We shouldn't have done such a good job," Mort Jaiffer said. "They must think we're the experts, the aces. We're going to get all the impossible jobs now."

  Joe let the men talk. He stayed out of the general grousing though.

  "They're not just going to leave us here, are they, Sarge?" Kam Goff asked.

  "No, they're not going to leave us here," Joe replied. It had not taken long for word to spread that they were not going to be picked up on schedule, and that there was no definite new rendezvous time. Whatever was going on, it did not sound good. But Joe had to believe that the Accord would not abandon an entire assault team. That would be—if nothing else—a public relations disaster.

  Joe was uncertain how to feel about this new mission. It did seem unfair that Echo Company would get chosen again. Most of the companies in the 13th had done nothing but lay around along the established perimeter since the first day of the fight. Echo had been in on everything.

  The mission briefing had been pitifully short on details, and the whole idea seemed a little less than sane to Joe. In one breath the first sergeant had told them that they would have to start conserving food and ammunition, especially ammunition. With the next breath he had told them that they were going on a long-distance raid against the Heggie forces in the capital, with the possibility that they would face odds of more than fifty to one. Perhaps a lot more. And that they were expected to keep all of those Heggies busy, possibly for several days.

  "How the hell can we conserve ammo and do that?" Joe had asked the first sergeant, face-to-face, not over the radio.

  "I know how it sounds. Just tell your men not to get trigger-happy on this lark," First Sergeant Iz Walker replied, very softly. "We do what we can, Joe. I don't make the orders."

  "Yeah, well." Joe just shook his head and walked away. He had made his point. All he could do then was obey those orders, the best he could.

  Now, he was shepherding his men back into one of the shuttles, but not to return to the ship for a ride home. Realizing that made Joe feel uncomfortable. Home. Maybe home was nothing more than a private room in a barracks full of soldiers, but it was a definite place to Joe Baerclau.

  "Just going to be a nuisance to the enemy, buzz around and keep them busy," Joe told the squad when they were in their seats in the shuttle. "In and out, back and forth. Play keep away if we have to. We did so good up at Maison, the colonel thinks we can lick the whole Heggie garrison."

  No one responded to Joe's light assessment of the mission. The platoon had already lost three men killed and two more seriously wounded and evacuated to the hospital ship. The fight had gotten personal. Everyone had lost buddies, but more than that, the news that the exec had been crushed by a tank had really sobered the men. Brass never got killed. They stayed back where it was safe. Most of the men continued to think that, despite evidence to the contrary.

  As soon as he strapped himself in, Joe leaned back and closed his eyes. It was no surprise that he was two days short on sleep and ready to go another night not only without sleep but marching across hostile territory toward a morning attack. Joe did not sleep in the shuttle, not really. He was not certain whether or not he even dozed. Afterward, he figured that he might have napped for three or four minutes. It could not have been longer than that. As soon as the shuttle lifted off, Joe was awake, eyes open, looking around.

  How long will my luck run? he asked himself. That was especially disturbing. He had never gone into combat asking himself that question before.

  —|—

  Originally considered to be "merely" a refinement to the latest reconciliation of general relativity and quantum mechanics, the Loughlin-Runninghorse equations were first sketched out in the twenty-first century AD. Even then, full expansion of the basic system of seventeen equations required nearly fifty hours of concentrated attention from a network of the six most powerful academic supercomputers on Earth. Understanding the equations and their most "obvious" implications took physicists and mathematicians most of the next century. It was recognized that if correct, the theories implicit in the equations required the objective reality of a paradimensional aspect to space—hyperspace (though the scientific community struggled heroically for years to find an acceptable alternative to that term, the general public, conditioned by two centuries of the term's use in fiction, refused every offering)—and the potential for the development of what was immediately (though somewhat imprecisely) dubbed antigravity because that was the use most readily imagined for the promised technology. More properly termed a protectable artificial gravity generator, it becomes antigravity only when its field is used to nullify local natural gravity. The field can also be projected so that its effect is added to local natural gravity, or directed at any angle to the natural field. For a time, considerable amounts of research money and thought were devoted to exploring the possibility of using projectable artificial gravity generators as offensive weapons, but eventually those efforts limped into oblivion.

  The Loughlin-Runninghorse equations also pointed the way to the development of the first hyperspace drive, a technology that proved to be surprisingly close to that for artificial gravity—a superset of the artificial gravity technology. In the words of one less-than-original contemporary academic wag, "You can't have one without the other."

  Perhaps the greatest measure of the significance of the theoretical work can be gauged from the fact that the year of the original publication of the Loughlin-Runninghorse equations was chosen as Year One, SA.

  —|—

  The five shuttles lifted off from the LZ tog
ether, then quickly moved apart. The only noise made by the drives that powered them was an almost subsonic whine, more felt than heard. Within the shuttles, there was the inevitable slight vibration, a product more of being in an atmosphere than just of being under AG drive. The shuttles headed west-southwest, barely clearing the highest treetops on the plateau. As soon as they passed the escarpment, the pilots of all five shuttles reduced power long enough to drop them nearly to the level of the rift valley below. The effect, for their passengers, was rather like being in an out-of-control lift cage as it hurtled three-hundred meters downward. Near the end of the drop, as the throttles were edged forward to provide more power, apparent gravity within the shuttles increased briefly to more than two and a half times normal. Once the descent had been checked, the feeling of weight returned to normal.

  "Another hot landing drill," Joe cautioned his men once he had recovered from the sensation of falling three-hundred meters. "We go out as if the entire Heggie army might be waiting for us." They might be, he warned himself. Supposedly, the Heggies were unable to spot and track the shuttles in the kind of maneuvers they were making. Perhaps they had spotted the landers coming in over the LZ earlier. It had still been daylight then, and the black craft would have been visible to the naked eye. But, according to Captain Ingels, the Heggies had no spyeyes in orbit over Porter any longer. Those had all been wiped out the morning of the initial landing, and there were no Schlinal ships around to replace them.

  But who really knows? Joe asked himself.

  "Get out in proper order and find a good piece of ground to hug," he continued, speaking slowly over the squad frequency. "According to CIC there won't be any Heggies right there, but assume they're wrong. It wouldn't be the first time." That was more for effect than accurate. CIC might occasionally miss something, but rarely by much. They were good. The 13th could not survive without good eyes, and better brains, watching over them. That meant, at present, that even if there were Heggies around where they landed, the force would probably be no larger than—perhaps—platoon size. A patrol that large might slip past the spyeyes.